Your brain power has been estimated at 100 petaflops requiring only 20 watts.

What would it be like to practically harness such power?

Super Humans

Chao Lu: Memory

In 2005, Chao Lu memorized an recited 67,890 digits of pi without error. It took 24 hours and 4 minutes. That is one digit every 1.2 seconds, continuously. He was a 24 year old college student at the time.

Ramon Campayo: Memory

Holding the most speed memory records, Campayo can memorize 17 numbers in half a second and 46 binary numbers in one second, among others. 46 binary numbers look like this by the way: 1010111010001011101100001101010101010101111001

Daniel Tammet: Synesthesia

At the age of 4, Tammet suffered several epileptic seizures, which is believed to have given him his condition. He sees numbers as colors and shapes and can do massive calculations without conscious effort. This includes cube roots to hundreds of decimal places and reciting 22,514 digits of pi in 5 hours. He speaks ten languages, became fluid in Icelandic in one week, and is a best-selling author.

Orlando Serrel: Acquired Savant

When he was 10, he was hit on the head by a baseball and was otherwise unaffected. Now 42, he can instantly recall every day of the week, the weather, and what he was doing for every single day since his accident. He is a janitor at Wal-mart.

Derek Pavacinini: Musical Genius

Born weighing 1.5 ponds, blind, and autistic, he cannot tell right from left or count to ten, but he can play every song he has ever heard in any style . He can also identify and play 10 notes that are played simultaneously for him.

Kim Peak: This is who the movie “Rain Man” is based on.

He knew every area and zip code for the entire US, and could give map-quest like directions within any major city or between them, could read two pages of a book at once (one with each eye), and has read over 12,000 books this way with a 98% accuracy recall rate. He was not mentally retarded or autistic, but was unable to master basic life skills. He was missing the corpus callosum, which connects the hemispheres or your brain.

For more amazing human feats (specifically memory) click here. You’ll see some overlap but more elaboration.

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4 thoughts on “Your Amazing Brain and What You Can Do With it”

The brain really is amazing! I struggle to hold 5 numbers in my head for any period of time, so to me these talents seem unimaginable.

What I’ve always wondered is whether ‘ordinary people’ are able to master these amazing feats of memory? For savants, perhaps these talents are at the expense of another brain region? But do all memory champions have specific memory talents to start with, or do they just possess good perseverance and patience to teach themselves this art? If so, then this is an extreme example of ‘rewiring the brain’, as presumably they’ve worked for years to maximize their brain’s capacity.

If this is the case, then I admire these people for using their brains to a capacity that most of us only dream of and never do anything about. A true example of ‘use it or lose it’ philosophy, and that you really are capable of anything if you put enough thought and effort into it.

To your point about whether or not this is truly brain rewiring, here’s a story of a journalist with no specific memory abilities who set out to see whether or not he could achieve the same feats. He ended up setting a US national record. It only took a year of training.

So yes, you care capable of much more cognitively than you probably think you are if you just put some effort into it.

I would encourage you to be much, much more skeptical about claims of abilities like these. While some of the people you mention (eg Chao Lu) have demonstrated their abilities under proper controlled conditions, others have not. Exaggerated claims of amazing intellectual abilities, presented without proper evidence, are commonplace. For example:

– Daniel Tammet’s claims have been thoroughly debunked as dubious in Joshua Foer’s book “Moonwalking with Einstein”. As documented in that book, Tammet was an unexceptional competitor in memory competitions, making some money on the side by claiming to be a psychic, before changing his name and claiming to be a savant with amazing abilities. Even now, long after his claims have been debunked as dubious, the same claims are echoing around the internet with no mention of his real background.

– Orlando Serrell claims that he got amazing abilities after being hit on the head with a baseball. But his abilities are nothing that a normal person can learn to do (eg telling the day of a week of a given date and remembering a few facts about what happens each day). There is absolutely no independent evidence of the baseball story being true.

– Kim Peek undoubtedly has an impressive knowledge of facts as he has demonstrated in his public performances, where he does impressive feats like naming all the US presidents in order. But where’s the evidence of him reading two pages, one with each eye, or having memorised 12,000 books? These are claims made by his father, with no independent, peer reviewed evidence of any kind.

These claims get repeated over and over agan, in blogs, newspaper articles, etc, because they make a good story, not because there is good evidence that they are actually true.

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About the Author

Kyle Hill is a science writer and communicator who specializes in finding the secret science in your favorite fandom. His work has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover Magazine, and more. He is a TV correspondent for Al Jazeera America's science and technology show TechKnow.